Selected Artists in ATH Magazine Issue 2

Marina Press Granger has nearly 15 years of experience working in the museums and galleries in New York City. She holds a master’s degree in Art History and a special place in her heart for artists.

Her work has brought her in close contact with a plethora of players in the art world; artists, collectors, curators, dealers, and consultants. Granger has also curated independently and contributed to gallery exhibition catalogues. It is her advice and experience that she wishes to share with you.

Since starting The Artist Advisory in 2018, Granger earned a Certification in Classical Chinese San Yuan Feng Shui and Reiki. In addition to her practical experience and analytical skills, Granger has been using these spiritual tools to guide artists and businesses towards success.

Born in Morristown, NJ Reed has a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and an MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In the 1980s she participated in the community mural movement in NY, painting several large public murals in NYC and elsewhere. She has worked as a photojournalist, a graphic designer and a designer of projected images for theater. Currently she lives in Brooklyn where she has a studio residency award with chashama.org at the Brooklyn Army Terminal.

In addition to her artistic career, Reed practices and teaches hands-on energy healing work, frequently traveling to Central and South America with the humanitarian group, Healer2Healer.org. The group exchanges knowledge with indigenous Maya and Amazonian populations, training them in running acupuncture and Reiki clinics. Her work as a healer has greatly effected her work as a painter.

I am currently exploring relationships and the power differentials inherent in them. The dynamic tension between the empowered and disempowered – this undergirds my work across media. My most recent show explores the labor imposed on women that often goes unnoticed. The work is informed by the way women have historically taken on service roles and have not received equal pay or treatment in the labor force. I use anecdotes from my ledger as an entry point for viewers to reflect on dynamics of power, control, and relationship structures. I am a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist. I received my B.A. in Education with a Minor in Photography from Washington State University, Pullman, WA and studied Contemporary Theatre for Performing Arts at the Lost Studio, Los Angeles, CA. My last solo exhibition was in DTLA arts district, I have also been featured in various group exhibitions, all in Los Angeles, CA.

Lara Restelli discovered the world of stones, gems, and minerals by chance five years ago. Her fascination and admiration for these nature’s beauties carried her on a long journey of exploration and discovery. Their exuberant colors and vibrant energy captivated her and drove her to make them the primary subject of her work. After her mother’s passing Restelli incorporated heirloom jewelry and objects as a way of honoring their connection beyond their fiscal world. Naturally, color, form, and composition became the pillars of her artistic expression. She paints larger-than-life, realistic paintings of rocks, gems, and crystals that are full of color. Restelli’s oil paintings convey a great sense of joy, balance, and serenity, yet they are strong and powerful.

Restelli’s mastership in the use of her media, together with a skillful technique, make her art stand out and impress. Her powerful management of feelings, color, and composition results in a final contemporary masterpiece that delights and profoundly connects with the viewer. Lara Restelli is a Miami-based artist who has successfully exhibited in many well-established art shows, including a solo show at MIFA Gallery, Superfine Art Fair, Red Dot Miami Art Basel Week, Art Palm Beach, ArtsParks Miami, and Loyola School of the Arts Miami, among others. Restelli’s artwork has also found its way into the homes of many Miami-based private collectors and numerous prestigious condominiums in Miami, FL, like Aria on the Bay, Melody, Square Station, Flagler on the River, and Skyview. Lara Restelli’s art education consists of many years of atelier training within the classical European school of realism.

Rebecca Youssef is a Los Angeles-based mixed media artist who was raised on the north shore of O’ahu, Hawaii. Galvanized by the sustainability movement to protect our planet, her work gives new life to discarded paper, boxes and bags by immortalizing them in art, thus honoring their journey from tree to canvas. Rebecca employs a broad range of sustainable practices and natural materials inspired by her love of cultivating native trees. Rebecca received her BFA from the University of Arizona in Tucson and then moved to Los Angeles to pursue her MA in Art Education at Loyola Marymount University. Following graduate school, Rebecca taught art at various schools across Los Angeles. Currently, she is an artist-in-residence at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had my hands in either dirt or paint. My love of process and undervalued materials and the cultivation of trees from seed is what has sustained and given purpose to my work. I am inspired by wild, untouched lands and carry a deep respect for hand-crafted art. Galvanized by the sustainability movement to protect our planet, my work finds a home in the space where art and environ- mentalism collide.

Scanlon explores the theme of intimacy in still life, landscape and abstract painting. Her journey into the world of painting and drawing began in a village outside of Aix-en-Provence. Studying painting and drawing at L’Universite Americain d’Aix-en- Provence, she learned to paint in the fields and country lanes of Le Tholonet. This quiet introduction into how to see and how to enter the world of representation and abstraction has informed her work ever since. The unruly elegance of nature is a deep source of inspiration for her paintings. Observation of how an object resides in the surrounding atmosphere is at the heart of her painting practice. Scanlon’s ongoing intention is to bring the elegance and visceral beauty of nature into her paintings and to bring joy and peace into the lives of her collectors.

For the past several years, Scanlon has studied painting with several contemporary painters including Carol Lefkowitz, Kathleen Dunphy and Dean Fisher. Her work was accepted into the 2022 National Oil and Acrylic Painters Society Associate Member Exhibition.

Her work was accepted into the 2022 National Oil and Acrylic Painters Society Associate Member Exhibition. In addition, her work was included in a group exhibit for the 2022 Marin Open Studios at The Bay Model in Sausalito, California. Scanlon’s work is represented in private collections across the United States.

Ellen Holleman is a painter, mixed-media visual artist and spatial designer based in the Netherlands. She trained as a spatial designer at the Utrecht School of the Arts (the Netherlands). Ellen prefers working with oil paints and traditional painting techniques, but also enjoys experimenting and using contemporary techniques, like digital collage and photography, as part of her creative process. The themes in her art are strongly affected by her work and experience as an urban design professional.

In 2013, she was invited as an artist in residence at ‘tHuisbasis’ in Poelenburg, Zaanstad, in collaboration with Sarah Spanton, a UK-based artist. From 2014 through 2017 she was the creative director of IFIKZ, a cultural festival in Zaanstad, where she built an installation on a barge that travelled on the river Zaan as part of the festival’s first edition. It moored at sites along the river for a series of storytelling events.

In 2020, after an intense artist retreat, she decided to focus on restarting a professional painting practice, shifting her career from the urban design field towards the arts. The following year, one of her new works was selected for a group show in the St. Maartens basilica, Zaltbommel, and she had her first solo exhibition at the cultural centre De Poorterij in September. In 2022, five paintings were exhibited in an augmented reality pavilion with ArtInside Gallery and she had an online solo show running from April through May. Additionally, three of her artworks were published in issue #5 of The Huts Magazine. This September, her second solo show opened at cultural centre De Poorterij and two of her paintings were featured in Life as a poem, by Cista Art Gallery, London.

Katherine Mason started her Lipstick Series in order to support women who have battled, or are currently battling, breast cancer. When she asked women what the hardest part of their journeys with cancer had been, they had a shockingly similar answer:

They didn’t feel beautiful anymore.

After finding out that a good friend was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer, Mason had the opportunity to sit down with her and try to better understand the battle she was fighting. She told her that before chemotherapy treatments, she would apply lipstick because it was the only thing that made her feel strong and beautiful again. From then on, Mason decided to create paintings entirely out of lipstick.

Her series continues to grow thanks to the generosity of those who have donated lipstick in honor and in memory of their loved ones. Mason’s privileged to be able to incorporate these people into her work, keeping their spirits alive!

This body of work will be sold to raise money for the National Breast Cancer Foundation in hopes of finding a cure, and in the meantime, reminding women just how beautiful they truly are.

Lexa Walsh is an artist and experience maker based in Oakland, CA. She is a graduate of Portland State University’s Art & Social Practice MFA program and holds a BFA in Ceramics from California College of Arts and Crafts. She was Social Practice Artist in Residence in Portland Art Museum’s Education department, received the Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Award, the CEC Artslink Award, the Gunk Grant, the de Young Artist Fellowship, and Kala’s Print Public Residency Award. Walsh has participated in projects, exhibitions and performances at Apexart, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Cité de la Musique, Exploratorium, de Young Museum, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Exploratorium, Federal Hall, Kala Art Institute, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Mills College Art Museum, Oakland Museum of California, NIAD, Portland Art Museum, SFMOMA, Smack Mellon, Taipei Artist Village, Walker Art Center, Williams College Museum of Art, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has done several international artist residencies, tours and projects.

San Francisco born, Inglewood based contemporary artist Marie-Jose began painting in 2016, employing surrealism as a tool for inspiring a previously indiscernible future and occasionally reimagining the past. Along with painting, collage & mixed media are the vehicles for exploring the multiplicity of the Black femme experience. Influenced by artists such as Salvador Dali, Kerry James Marshall, and the artist’s Nigerian heritage, many scenes offer Black figures among dreamlike cloudscapes and thematic metaphors that refer to the intricacy of life, the consequence of introspection, and feelings of vulnerability, hope, and courage. Naming their style as ‘Afro-Surrealistic’, the work reexamines the pre-conceived barriers of Black liberation. Marie-Jose has participated in numerous art markets and festivals nationwide, and had paintings in the Affordable Art Fair in New York and Aqua Art Miami in Miami Beach in 2022. They have shown work with the LA LGBT Center and the Museum of Science + Industry in Chicago. They were also a recent 2022 Artist in Residence participant in Fukuoka, Japan and made their international debut with an exhibition with Studio Kura.

Shuoran Zhou was born in Beijing, China, and is an artist currently located in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated with a BFA in Oil Painting from China Academy of Art in 2019, and an MFA in Studio art from Syracuse University. Shuoran’s work has been exhibited internationally in China, Spain, Belgium, the United States, as well as in several online exhibitions including ones juried by Robert Ebendorf and Laura Kalman. Aside from being an artist, Shuoran was a jewelry instructor at Syracuse University for two years and is currently teaching introductory jewelry classes and beading classes at Brooklyn Metal Works and 92NY in New York.

With a metalsmithing background, Shuoran found connections with glass beads and uses them as the main material in her current work. She associates the belittled, overrated perception of the beads, the laborious, delicate nature of beading with women’s social status, and stereotypical perceptions of gender roles. Shuoran combines beading with metalsmithing techniques to create jewelry and wearable objects that serve as a voice that tells her own stories and communicates to the audience who has similar experiences.

Erin Elizabeth ONeill (b. 1983, St. Louis Missouri) lives and works in Chicago. She received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2008.n her paintings and drawings, O’Neill explores the healing power of the inner child while navigating her own generational trauma. Her figures are suspended in negative space creating an intense line of focus between the viewer and the subjects gaze. ONeill plays with collaging her reference images in one space as she tries to depict the duplicity of emotions in the human experience.

Growing up, E. E. Kono’s family split their time between a diverse international community and small-town, middle America. The experience led to a life-long curiosity for how stories and symbols create meaning that is then interwoven between societies. Initially, this inspired a career in children’s literature, writing and illustrating picture books. Now, she explores that imagery using ancient techniques and materials to create detailed, precise paintings that connect universal symbols and mythologies encountered in her travels and through the mixed heritage of her family. While she is a self-taught painter, Kono studied art history at the University of Hull (England) and The University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA). She has studied traditional egg tempera techniques under the guidance of artist Koo Schadler. Although Kono is focusing on fine art, she is also an award-winning author and illustrator. Kono’s work is collected internationally and is in the collection of the Mazza Museum (Findley, OH). Her work has also been exhibited in notable venues, including La Luz de Jesus (Los Angeles, CA), Modern Eden (San Francisco, CA), Beinart Gallery (Melbourne Australia), and Riverside Art Museum (Riverside, California).

Deb Slowey’s paintings engage the viewer with stories about myths and legends, living in a moment, in an imagined space, yet rooted in mathematical principles and formulas. The Fibonacci sequence, the Golden Ratio, and Phi paired with Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity all inform her work. The stories can take place in the past or the future. Deb Slowey lives and works in the Tampa Bay region of Florida. She studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, aesthetics at the Barnes Foundation School of Art, and printmaking at Bob Blackburn’s PMW. For nearly two decades, Slowey lived and worked in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City under the mentorship of Will Barnet. Slowey had solo exhibitions at notable galleries such as Chuck Levitan Gallery (New York, NY) and The Stone House Museum (Hasbrouck, NY). Her work is also in prominent permanent collections such as the US Embassy in Paris, France, The Printmaking Workshop Collection (New York, NY), St. Mary’s College (Maryland), Parana Curitiba (Brazil), and many more. She has also been a Registered Nurse for nearly two decades.

Joanne Steinhardt lives and works in the Greater New York City Metro Area. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Maine College of Art and a Bachelor of Science in Photography from the RIT School of Photographic Arts and Sciences. Steinhardt’s work has been exhibited at The Equity Gallery, Carter Burden, The Tampa Museum of Art, Polk County Museum, and Covivant Gallery. She has been Artist in Residence at Willow Brook Farm and Art Center in New Hampshire and done several residencies in US and Europe. She has lectured and led workshops at numerous institutions around the US and abroad, including Parsons School for Design, University of Florida, NYU Tisch ITP, the Harrison School for the Arts, and La Biennale del fin del Mundo in Ushuaia, Argentina. Previously, Steinhardt achieved tenure in both the Art and Communication Departments at the University of Tampa where she conceived a multidisciplinary Electronic Media Art and Technology Program designed to support those interested in a self-directed academic Major combining art, communication, English, music, computer information systems, and entrepreneurship.

Sarah Verardo is a contemporary oil painter based in Providence, Rhode Island. Having grown up in coastal New England, the ocean has always been a familiar representation of home. After living in New York City for 14 years, Sarah returned to Rhode Island, connecting with the seaside New England environment in a different way as an adult. The idea of home, and in particular proximity to the ocean, changed from a pacifying comfort to become more of a spiritual and reflective touchstone. Through her work, Sarah pays homage to the role her environment has had in her personal evolution through both trying and celebratory times in her life.

Sarah graduated from Georgetown University with a BA in Government and, when not painting, works in digital marketing. She is an Elected Artist at the Art League of Rhode Island. Her work has been featured in juried exhibitions with the Art League of Rhode Island and the California Art League. Sarah’s work belongs to private collections within the United States and internationally.

Taylor Bamgbose is a self-taught visual artist based in Indianapolis, IN. Also a certified life coach, she works at the intersection of art and mental health. Her vibrant figurative paintings take the audience on a journey of guided self-reflection, inviting the viewer to explore how their thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and behaviors are working under the surface to shape their lived experience. In the four years she’s been working as an artist, she has completed three major bodies of work; Verses, a poetry-inspired collection; State of Mind, which explores the nuances of everyday emotions; and Deal With It, which tackles how we cope with big emotions, for better or worse. Taylor’s work has won several awards, including “Best of Show” at two juried competitions. In 2022, she was awarded the Robert D. Beckmann, Jr. Emerging Artist Fellowship through the Indianapolis Arts Council. She was also selected for the Hoosier Women Artists Program, an initiative of the Indiana Arts Commission. Her work has been displayed in the Indiana Statehouse and in vinyl murals throughout the city of Indianapolis, as well as featured in several art publications, including I Like Your Work’s Spring Exhibition Catalog, Create! Magazine, New Visionary Magazine, and Divide Magazine.

Sarrah Zadeh is a conceptual surrealist artist working primarily with oil paint. Zadeh finds inspiration from human connections and behaviors, and recently she has been exploring the intangible world of the subconsciousness. Her artworks narrate stories, bringing to light social taboos and norms, particularly the role of the women our society, allowing us to contemplate and question our social situations and surroundings. Originally from Iran, Sarrah Zadeh, has been living in the States since the age of ten, and for the past 15 years, she has been dividing her time between Colombia and USA. She holds a BA in Art from University of Houston.

I have always been intrigued not only by humanity and the role social standards play on human behavior, but also by the duality in nature and our subconsciousness. As an artist I believe my role is to tell a story, to create art that makes people think, ask questions, and in turn make them feel.

Aleksandra was born and lived in a small town Kherson in southern Ukraine. Since childhood, as soon as Aleksandra learned to hold a pencil in her hand, she began to create. I can’t stop creating! – she says. Aleksandra tries to draw as soon as images come to her mind. There are days when there are too many, and then she sketches to capture the ideas. Inspiration comes from many sources, one could say that life itself inspires her.

Aleksandra’s work has different themes, but what unites them is beauty and love for the world. Aleksandra always starts new work only in a good mood and creates only good subjects. She says – “I am a living person and, feeling and seeing pain, and injustice, I can also be sad. But I don’t see the point in multiplying those emotions by making hard pictures – that’s my principled position. “

With her art she is in dialogue with the inner child of each viewer, addressing the soul itself and reminding that life is happiness. And it is in each of us. Waking up in the morning is a great joy because there are blank canvases waiting for me.” – she says.

Aleksandra has a higher art education and professionally engaged in creative work for over 16 years. The basic direction of creativity is painting, book illustration and murals.

Sharon Moody was born in Florida and grew up in North Carolina; after a BA in Fine Art degree from Appalachian State University, she worked in Washington, DC where she exhibited her figurative drawings at the Washington Women’s Art Center. She then moved to NJ where she won a painting fellowship from the NJ State Council on the Arts for her photorealist paintings of small-town streets. Later returning to the DC area with her family, she earned an MFA in painting from George Washington University where she was the Morris Louis Fellow. As part of her technical training, she copied masterworks at the National Gallery of Art. She has been a teaching artist for most of her career, combining studio practice with teaching at George Washington University and later at Georgetown University. Multiple series of paintings of still life subjects evolved into her current specialization in trompe l’oeil compositions of vintage comic books, which have been exhibited nationally and internationally and have been acquired by numerous private and public collections, including the Schwartz Art Collection at Harvard, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Art Bank and others.

Texas-based artist Lauren Lewchuk is a self-taught creative inspired by nature. She has 14 years of experience in various creative fields including graphic design, screen-printing, faux finishes, scenic art, prop fabrication, and mural painting.

Since her start as a fine artist, Lewchuk has been primarily working with acrylics, spray paint, and digital mediums. She creates detailed and elaborate compositions that are heavily inspired by nature, specifically micro-organisms and nature macro-photography. Use of color, movement, flow, patterns and repetition are important visual elements in her work that symbolize underlying themes having to do with mental states of being, identity, societal expectations, personal boundaries, spirituality, and existentialism. Mental health/illness is a major theme that directly relates to the use of these organic forms in her work. Spending time surrounded by nature has been shown to help reduce anxiety and depression. There is also a certain urgency to nature; a fleetingness and delicacy that creates a more visceral way to experience and appreciate the present moment, which many people with mental illness struggle with. Use of these visual elements are a way to contemplate meaning, purpose, and our limited time. The inviting and colorful compositions are both a form of escapism and meditation, but also symbolic of masking and concealing darker undertones.

Since her emergence as an artist in 2019, Lewchuk has been selected to participate in several exhibitions throughout Dallas/Fort Worth. Her hyper detailed space/seascape painting “Galaxsea” won First Place at the Precious Metals Exhibition with Texas Visual Arts Association in 2019; in 2020 “Oceanic” was selected as a gallery pick for the New Texas Talent Exhibition with Craighead Green Gallery, and Lewchuk entered the realm of large-scale murals by completing a 20’x50’ mural for Inspiration Alley in the Foundry District of Fort Worth, and she also had the amazing opportunity to design an exclusive fabric collection for Joann Stores. Currently, Lewchuk continues to focus on larger scale fine art and murals as well as digital pattern design.

I am interested in re-evaluating stories that we have been told about femininity and womanhood. I grew up in a framework of femininity that prized agreeability in behavior and appearance above all which left me feeling silenced and unsure of myself. So I challenge and examine these proscribed notions in my work and create paintings that are large, expressive explorations of my voice. Ellen Burgin received her BFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her MFA from Louisiana State University. Burgin’s paintings have been exhibited nationwide and are included in the permanent collections of The Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama and the Alexandria Museum of Art in Louisiana. Burgin is the recipient of several grants and awards for her work, including a Wake County Regional Artist grant and a Vermont Studio Center Artist Residency grant. Burgin was born and raised in Marion, North Carolina, a small town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and has called San Francisco home since 2006.

Jena Thomas’s current work engages in a contemporary dialogue with concerns about land development. The artist assembles a perspective that concerns how human beings “idealize” what nature is and use this as a basis to create artificial environments for ourselves to exist within. However, at times, these perfectly fabricated environments can be deceiving. It is no longer just an issue of domesticating the land to make it livable. Instead, Thomas is concerned with the way we transform our world into a suburban theme park. Through the combination of synthetic colors and naturalistic landscape, she seeks to capture the unnatural oddities of spaces such as swimming pools, miniature golf courses and the medians used to decorate highways. In her recent series “Liminal Landscapes” Thomas examines how we as a contemporary society view landscape. Whether it is zooming by it in a car, out a glass window from thousands of miles above the ground, or from the comfort of our own homes through the magic of Google, there seems to be an unnatural disconnect between our physical selves and the space in front of us.

Born in Minsk, Belarus, Tanya Levina moved to New York City in 1995. Levina studied painting at the Art Students League, Slade School of Fine Arts in London and The New York Academy of Art. Tanya Levina is a recipient of a COJECO Blueprint Fellowship award and has been featured in numerous exhibitions at venues including Trask Gallery at the National Arts Club, NYC, Annmarie Sculpture Garden and Arts Center in Solomons, MD and MoRA (Museum of Russian Art) in Jersey City, NJ. Her work can be found in private collections in London, New York, LA, Chicago and Boston.

Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Juliana Alonso-Olarte, likes to say that she is composed of equal parts sentiment, compassion and goofiness. Influenced by her father’s passion for nurturing appreciation of her native land and history through improvised bedtime stories and travel, she was often found painting and making. While art remained at the roots, she studied Industrial Design and worked as a graphic designer until a strong desire to experience life outside the computer came calling a few years after moving to the U.S.A. This new perspective as an immigrant made her pursue painting to honor the most meaningful moments of her life and culture. She now resides in Houston, TX with her husband Shawn and two old gatos, enjoying sunlight and bird songs from her studio windows. Exploring nature and abstraction through playful watercolors to create paintings and surface design collections is how she celebrates life after experiencing a neurological event that affected her motor ability, changing her life forever.

Frances Melhop works in tactile mediums, exploring the tensions between the virtual and physical ways we experience the world. Her current focus is impermanence, evidence of the hand, imperfection, and human presence and absence in our screen and material lives. Frances Melhop, born in Christchurch, New Zealand, currently lives and works in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. She holds an MFA and BFA from the University of Reno (Nevada). Melhop’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions worldwide at notable institutions such as Autry Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Brownsville Museum (Brownsville,TX), Cincinnati Art Museum, (Cincinnati, OH), Murray State University, (Murray, KY), Gertrude Herbert Institute, (Augusta, GA), and Arizona State University, (Phoenix, AZ). She has exhibited collaborative works with Susan Norrie at Nancy Hoffman Gallery (New York, NY) and the NSW Museum of Art, (Sydney, Australia). Melhop was awarded the Outstanding Artist Award in 2019 from the University of Reno, NNDA Innovator of the Year in 2014, and Luerzer’s Archive World’s Best Photographers in 2009/2010. In 2020 she opened Melhop Gallery °7077, at Lake Tahoe, Nevada, representing 12 national and international artists. She also curates themed group shows with invited exceptional artists. For the last 5 years she taught in the art departments of University of Nevada, Reno, Western Nevada College, Truckee Meadows Community College and Lake Tahoe Community College. Melhop’s early career was spent as an acclaimed editorial fashion photographer based out of Sydney, Australia, London, UK, and Milan, Italy. She made narrative fairytale photographic stories of women for women. Her work appeared in Vogue Australia, Vogue Italia editions, Pelle and Gioielli, Elle Portugal, Gioia Italy, and Marie Claire Italy.

Nancy Andruk Olson focuses on our human relation to nature while using improvisational painting techniques coupled with a high chroma palette. The high chroma signifies an imagined landscape that describes both the practice of painting itself and the experience of being in a landscape. Andruk Olson’s work uses nature as a starting point to explore how paint can interpret our experience with the land and the experiences we have on the land. Natural objects are also used as a metaphor for human connection and a description of the feelings that arise as a result of human interactions. Andruk Olson has been a lifetime painter. Andruk Olson started painting as a child with her mother, who is an art teacher, and never really stopped. Raised in Los Angeles, she attended Art Center College of Design as a high school student. Andruk Olson has a BFA in painting from BYU, where she spent most of her time working with Bruce Hixson Smith. Andruk Olson also has a Post-Baccalaureate certificate from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her painting approach is direct, using a lot of impressionist techniques. The improvisation, the interaction of the paint, the interplay of the materials and the intensity of the color are part of the language for her. Andruk Olson makes a lot of her own paint to ensure the intensity of the pigment is as high as possible. Other artists who focus on color to capture memories such as Pierre Bonnard, Wolf Kahn, Inka Essenhigh and John McCallister are a major source of inspiration for Andruk Olson. Andruk Olson recently completed the A-I-R Residency at the Bountiful Davis Art Center.

Linda Mann lives and works in Bellevue, WA. Mann studied at the Gage Academy of Art (Seattle, WA) and The Academy of Art College (San Francisco, CA). She has had solo exhibitions at the Hyatt Regency (Bellevue, WA) and Quent Cordair Fine Art (Burlingame, CA). Mann has been selected Associate Living Master by the Artist Renewal Center as well as a Finalist in their 2020, 2021, and 2022 International Salons.

In unstable times, it is valuable to step back and be reminded that despite chaos, the world is still understandable and beautiful. My still life paintings evoke this ordered, stylized reality. I paint with an understanding of how people see and understand, not by recording every detail, as a camera or computer would, but rather by observing the essential, and editing out the unimportant and distracting. Working exclusively from life with no reference to photographs, I observe the ephemeral effects of light and how they appear to the human eye, re-creating the experience in oil paint. Through my selective and heightened focus and dramatic lighting, everyday objects are imbued with weight and meaning.

Shelly is a visual artist, raised in South Africa, of Israeli origin and now working from her studio in North London. She completed a Law degree in South Africa and is a self taught artist who turned her attention to painting, after a career in the City of London. Her shimmering paired back colour field paintings explore a process of mixing unconventional materials together to create a surface where glitter, paint and pigment particles coalesce to incantatory effect. Her process-intensive paintings are reductive in nature, exploring elements of colour, materiality and intimacy and are a response to processes of internal enquiry and external visual influences derived from the world of fashion and social media. Shelly’s work has sold internationally to private collectors. She has produced numerous commission pieces and has collaborated with curators and interior designers such as Kelly Hoppen. She has exhibited in group shows as well as in Art Fairs such as The Affordable Art Fair, Roys Art Fair and The Other Art Fair. Her work has been been featured in numerous publications and online exhibition.

Gale Rothstein’s art practice has always been about putting together the pieces. Currently, Rothstein makes assemblage sculptures in which assembled boxes and environments (Inter-Exteriors) emerge from a strong narrative and historical framework. Referenced through reuse, the work is informed by her former career as a jewelry designer and life-long pursuit of collecting antiques, collectibles, found objects, harvested broken appliances, and other used items. Rothstein’s work is influenced by her father’s memory, who was a jack of all trades and one of the original recyclers and re-purposers decades before it was commonplace. She inherited his collection of parts and incorporates many of his objects into her assemblages, further supporting the work’s historical and personal foundation.

Tricia Townes is a painter and educator from Nashville, TN. Townes’ s practice consists of figurative, design-based, and social practice works focusing on healing communities of color and healing dysfunction across communities. Townes has attended several prestigious residencies, including those at Skowhegan, The Fine Arts Work Center, and MassMoCA.

Arline Mann is a watercolor artist. Her watercolors contemplate light and shadow in personal spaces and on cherished objects. Building on the traditions of Nineteenth- Century Scandinavian painters such as Christen Kobke and Constantin Hansen, and on watercolorists such as Anders Zorn and John Stuart Ingle, her work seeks clarity, calm and joy, and projects a benevolent world. In Mann’s watercolors, light often stresses the beauty and comfort of a distinctive room or familiar objects such as glass, books, and soap – always with a sense of human presence. Mann lives and works both in New York City and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her work has been selected for some 35 notable competitive group exhibitions at the National Arts Club (New York, NY) and The Salmagundi Club (New York, NY), as well as for museum and New York City gallery invitationals. Mann had a solo exhibition at The Association for Visual Arts (Chattanooga, TN), and a solo show of her work will be sponsored by a major New York City corporation in 2023.